When you were a child, you may have heard mystical stories of humans transforming into animals. This metamorphosis often came with an evolution in the main character’s philosophy, allowing them to express and understand themselves on a deeper level. The crux of this lesson is that the body is physical; it is as shallow as it is tangible. Your mind, however, holds who you truly are. Shelby Meyerhoff expresses parts of these themes in her transmutation art: body paint.
Meyerhoff is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Boston area. She has studied visual arts at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the New England School of Photography, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds an Artium Baccalaureus degree in the Comparative Study of Religion from Harvard College and a Master of Divinity Degree from the Harvard Divinity School.
Here is a conversation with Meyerhoff. The interview has been edited for clarity.
MAHONY: Why does nature fascinate you?
MEYERHOFF: It’s been that way for me since I was a child. I’ve always been fascinated by nature. I mean, there’s something beautiful and infinitely complex about the natural world, and it’s a multisensory experience. The visual, the smells, the sense of touch, the feeling of the air. Everything about our bodies is attuned to the natural world. There’s a kind of transcendence too; the natural world far predates any of us, and we’ll continue in different ways long after each of us is gone. It feels to me like I’m connected with something so much larger than myself when I’m out in nature, and it’s always given me a sense of peace and a feeling of being alive.
MAHONY: Could you tell me more about how nature and activism are expressed through your art?
MEYERHOFF: In my amorphic series, I paint on my own face and body and transform myself into different creatures inspired by the natural world. A lot of my work comes out of that wonder and fascination with nature and this sense of wanting to deeply explore our connection to the natural world as one species among many, but also as a species, ourselves as animals. How do we gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human by learning more about other living things in terms of action and advocacy? I mean, that’s taken a lot of different forms for me at different times in my life.
I used to work for organizations that focused on environmental issues and other important challenges. And so that is an important mode of operating, pressuring, elected officials, being aware of the systemic impacts of climate change and the systemic causes. And I think that’s something that’s important to keep up, even as many of us have different practices and ways of bringing environmental awareness into our own lives as if my professional path has changed. I also have been involved more in local organizations and a local campaign to protect our woods near our home. And so, it’s given me a greater idea of to what extent a lot of work, especially around protecting habitats and places is happening at the very local level.
I’m always thinking about the many levels, the local, state, federal, and different opportunities to be active and the awareness that it must be done in community that no one of us will take on every aspect of the problem. But that if each of us can find the place where our gifts and capacities connect with the needs of this moment and this crisis, that’s where the power to make the monumental change that is needed is going to come from.
MAHONY: Do you have any specific or vivid memories that you have or have tried to capture in your art?
MEYERHOFF: I grew up near a different public park that’s a woodland and has a lake as well. And I think that was a profound gift to be able to go out in nature. And my parents really let me just go and explore in a way that I think is less and less common for children now in America. There’s less unstructured time and less of a feeling of safety and security in communities for parents to let children wander in the woods as I got to do. And so, I think that that was such a special experience to have growing up, to be connected to the natural world and a sense of moving through it in a way that at times was solitary.
There was this sense of singular focus. I grew up in the age before the internet was widely used, before cell phones. So, when I was out in nature, I wasn’t carrying a phone with me. That is something that I miss, and I think a lot about (it) now. That’s a memory in a sense, remembering what it was like to be completely present. That is something that I feel the difference of every day.
MAHONY: When people see your photos, what do you hope they feel?
MEYERHOFF: I can’t predict what people will feel, but I hope they feel something. That makes me happy, when people have a reaction; that it really got to them because we do live in a visual culture where we’re really inundated with imagery. Making work that people stop and look at and have a visceral reaction to is really an amazing thing to be able to do. And I love hearing the variety of reactions that people have. I welcome all the reactions because I think complex work invites multiple emotional responses.
Some people find the work inviting and engaging; they enjoy looking at it. Some people will say the work feels tense or that there’s images that are disturbing to them or feel confrontational. And I think all of that is in there. It’s wonderful to hear what people take from the work. I do feel very trusting in the viewer in that the insights and reactions people have brought to me in terms of what the work makes them think about have been additive to my own understanding of what the work means and have often felt very resonant with my own ideas. That to me does feel that the work is successful in the sense that it seems to be striking according (to) others, that it is also resonant with what is happening inside me, my thoughts and feelings about the natural world, and our relationship to it at this crisis moment.
MAHONY: Your zoomorphism works with nature, with humans, with ourselves, and so the theme of connection in your work is very captivating. How does this connection relate to your other works?
MEYERHOFF: The idea of interconnection is so fundamental to my practice now and how it’s grown in the last seven or so years since I’ve started working on Zoomorphic. It has a very practice-based space relevance in that so much of my work has become about the relationship between different disciplines of art making, how to integrate photography and painting and performance. And in my Multiverses series, I’m bringing in photographs of the natural world, photographs of paintings I’ve made. Then I’m using digital drawing to sort of bring them together. I think there’s a practice-driven element to it. There’s an openness to seeing how things might work together that is unexpected or that are unexpected.
MAHONY: Something that you mentioned in the interview with ART Inc. was your relationship with gender and the constraints of it. Could you expand on how zoomorphism of links to your relationship with gender and identity?
MEYERHOFF: I want to talk about that. I’ve never felt that gender or being a woman should be seen as defining my selfhood or my soul or who I am on the deepest level. And when I’m making zoomorphic, I get to express all the possibilities of being alive beyond gender.
I think that’s one reason that the work has been sustaining for me for so long. There’s a fullness of presence that is life-giving. To be free of those constraints is an important nourishing experience for me. And I’m grateful to have a space where that full range of possibilities for expression is available, and I want to see a world in which that is available to all people. I don’t want that world to be only in my studio.
MAHONY: On the topic of gender and women, you talked a little about portraits during your interview as well. I was wondering how the photographical portraits of your zoomorphism reflects and diverges from the history of women in portraits?
MEYERHOFF: It’s a really fascinating history and there’s so much to learn. I think of artists that have been important for me in understanding the power of self-portraiture and the variety of ways self-portraiture can be understood. Some of the people that I’ve looked at as I’ve grown as an artist were Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and as well as nonbinary artists like Claude Kahun, and seeing the many ways they’re using their bodies to make work. And the interesting question of performance versus self-revelation. And I think all of those artists in different ways are inviting me.
To reframe, all of those artists in different ways, their work invites a lot of thinking about to what extent artists are performing something versus sort of telling a story about their own selfhood. And I am grateful for the opportunities to learn about the long history of women and non-binary people making self-portraiture. And I feel like it’s been so thought-provoking for me to ask how my own work is part of a long and varied set of traditions around self-portraiture, while also recognizing the ways in which each artist is taking that story in a different direction.
MAHONY: What did you learn about yourself during the quarantine era?
MEYERHOFF: So many things. Where do we start? Well, I was really grateful to be with my family. My husband and my daughter were in honor the center of my life. And I felt so grateful for their love and companionship at that moment of world crisis. I felt a lot of grief at the suffering and disability and death happening all around us. At the same time, I am really grateful for the people in our lives who we loved and missed being able to be with so much. I do feel like it’s an ongoing process during and since then of clarifying, always asking what is most important in my life, in our lives now. I’m so grateful to be alive and I’m so grateful to be healthy.
I do think that following the pandemic and many of the other events happening in our country and our world, I noticed in my own work a greater sense of tension and confrontation. And I think there was a way in which the pandemic, I kind of made all the more apparent, the many challenges and in crises that our world is facing and the necessity of approaching them in a way that is collective and justice-centered.
The impact of the pandemic experience on me personally and on many other people is still unfolding. I think it’s an important question, even if I’m not exactly sure I have the answers, because I do think we live in a very fast-paced world and a fast-paced news cycle and that there can be a sense that so much is happening so quickly and so many challenges are happening that the time it takes to really fully process is much longer than the time that the public conversation actually continues. It’s a question I continue to hold.
MAHONY: What draws you to working with youth?
MEYERHOFF: I really enjoy children; I find them on the whole funny and interesting. They have so many questions about the world because they’re seeing things fresh for the first time. The opportunity to hear their questions and observations is enlivening and makes me think again about things or understandings of things that I may have taken for granted.
I’ve found having to explain something to a child always makes me think again. What do I really know? What do I really understand or think about something? What more could I learn? Those are really wonderful conversations to be having.
MAHONY: Is there anything else that you want to share?
MEYERHOFF: Multiverses actually started before the pandemic. From time to time, I would walk around my neighborhood in the woods near my house and sometimes take photographs. I had taken some kind of small-scale aerial, I guess you could say, in the sense that I’m hovering the camera maybe a couple feet off the ground taking pictures of a pile of fallen leaves or a puddle. And then during the pandemic, I put making news amorphic on hold. I was home with my husband and my daughter. We were isolating. And in the mornings, I would take her on long walks through the neighborhood. She was a toddler at the time, so she was kind of low to the ground and she would stop and look at things. So maybe she would splash in a puddle or kick a pile of leaves.
We took these walks for months. And while I was taking them, we were having this experience of being so lucky to be able to isolate ourselves and stay as safe as we could. For my daughter, her experience was that of feeling safe and being with her parents. But I was always thinking about the suffering, the death disability that was happening outside of our own life. It was this strange juxtaposition between the relative peacefulness of a fall day kicking the leaves and what I was thinking about in my own head much of the time. There were these two realities that I was holding. And then another kind of dual reality, or I guess you could say a dual awareness, was that I was always thinking about what kinds of experiences my daughter would be having at one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half years old birthday parties where she could be within 6 feet of other children or being able to hug her grandparents.
These were the things we couldn’t and didn’t give her. And as time went on, more and more of those milestones were happening and I almost felt like I could see and touch that other life we should have been having, but I couldn’t. And so, in the midst of all this, I would come back to the studio and work. I worked with at least one of those older photographs, but mostly working with different pictures I was taking. In the afternoons when I’d go back to the places my daughter and I had walked, and I brought those photographs into Photoshop. And then I would also make very simple paintings in my studio and take photographs of those and bring them both into Photoshop. And I played around and ended up with, for each of the pieces, with two layers that are each composites of different images.
I put one layer on top of the other and kind of using a digital drawing process, kind of scrape away at the top layer to reveal what was underneath. And when I stepped back and looked at these images in the months after we were vaccinated and starting to put back together the pieces of the life we wanted to move into, it struck me this sense of fracturing and this sense of two different worlds and looking between them or two different awarenesses. And that emerged from the work without me needing to direct it to. It’s just sort of a reflection of what it felt like to me at that time. And I continue to do experiments combining different images that I’ve made and looking at the ways that unexpected combinations can produce meaningful results and wonder how that process might evolve or speak to new meanings over time. I’m so glad we got that. I do love multiverses too.
And it really did come from just following where the process leads, rather than being overly directive about, I’m going to make work about this, just saying what images are coming to me? Or what things am I interested in exploring and seeing what that reveals or where that leads.
MAHONY: Does that general curiosity take form in your amorphism as well?
MEYERHOFF: Yeah, in the sense that I know what my values and concerns are and the influences that have been in my experience of the natural world or what I’m interested in in terms of self-portraiture, but then there’s a process of letting the work lead that I also think is really important to be able to say, where might this go? That may also be driven by intuition or curiosity, or just a sense of being called in a particular direction and kind of trusting that. So it’s a back-and-forth between the meaning-making or the intent and the like.
